My comments on the four papers here are not in any way a unified essay, but rather are some reflections as well as questions I was inspired to ask by reading the papers. The papers fall together into two pairs of related essays, one pair, comprising the papers by Lehman and Aung-Thwin, being largely concerned with “bonded” relationships in the general context of traditional societal organization in Burma and Thailand, and the other pair of papers, by Wyatt and Kirsch, focusing on a particular early northern Thai law code, the so-called “Laws of King Mangrai”, and what it suggests about the society in which and for which it was written.